Are You a Gweep?

The term "gweep" (a nerd's nerd) originated at my undergraduate university to describe computer science majors.

When I was an EE major at WPI, the computer science (CS) majors were called "gweeps." At that time, the school had VT100 terminals in either the computer lab or in a few other places. One of those places was in a corner next to the mail boxes. The gweeps were the people at the terminals on Saturday nights,even when we were not in exam perods. People in other departments would walk by the terminals and yell "GWEEEEEEP" with their pitch rising during the Es.

A DEC VT100 terminal.Did you learn to program on one of these?

As engineers, we've all been called "nerds" or "geeks," but gweeps (or gweepers) are a special breed, kind of people that those who are called nerds think of as nerds. During my undergraduate career, WPI was experimenting with a radically new engineering curriculum where the requirements for graduation were based on projects and one huge engineering exam, not necessarily on academic credits. At the time, you could take any courses you wanted and if you could complete the projects, you could graduate. That's changed. Here's why.

Some students, often CS majors, would take all or nearly all of their technical courses in programming. (We were required to take five related humanities courses and complete a project in that area, a requirement that's still in place.) So, these gweeps knew all about programming, but were so narrow that they often were clueless about how to use their skills to solve problems. It was pretty much programming for programming's sake.

Real gweeps don't smoke. It distracts from the programming experience.

Some EE majors took more than one programming course so they could get a broader perspective and learn how to program computers to solve real problems. But CS majors came out so narrow that the faculty later required students to take a few technical courses outside of their major. Like most EEs, I didn't wait to be told to branch out to other departments because the expected (but not required at the time) physics and chemistry. I took one programming course, FORTRAN, but didn't like it much. Machine shop was much better for me.

One of the great things about starting as an EE is that you can move into programming, but you can also move into mechanical design, optics, semiconductor physics, and host of other areas. Can CS majors do that?

IO programming: that's why some test stations still run Win98 and older versions of Windows and Even DOS. You had direct access to the IO port. that was changed and made much more complex for security reasons or for Microsfot to make more money.

Martin wrote: And yet, we work more today than back then. What went wrong?

While some things are indeed a lot easier now -- my favorite example is being able to capture transient events using a digital 'scope -- many things are much harder. In particular, it's much harder for a CPU to talk to I/O devices. My favorite example of this is that the PDP-11 Peripherals Handbook has a chapter called "Programming" which covers how to write I/O programs in PDP-11 assembly language using both busy-waiting and interrupts. The chapter is eight pages long.

Nowadays device-level programmers have to deal with Windows or Linux device drivers, which require understanding thousands of pages of arbitrary complexity, and modern SoCs require hundreds or thousands of lines of initialization code just to get started.

Another example is USB. If you're using a properly-designed USB device, it's really easy: you just plug it in and it installed as if by magic. If you're writing the software to implement that magic, it's a nightmare.

The great thing about punch cards is that you can fold them into missiles and launch them using a rubber band. They're really dangerous: the point is sharp and they'll go quite a ways into acoustic tile ceilings.

I don't miss them either, as I paid $350 for my first floppy drive. An Apple II with 147K storage capacity! Woz was the man. New EE's now do not have a clue on how much easier things are now, compared to back then.

You are not old school unless you used punch cards to enter your programs. My first embedded programming was with an Altair 8800(?) toggleing switches. Then got to work with a 6803 system writing assembly language and storing them on the 8 inch floppy!! First system design was a 6502 based cpu, so wrote assembly code on an Apple II computer.

A few years after graduating, I returned to my fraternity house and was appalled. There was a TV-100 in the second floor landing, connected over an acoustic dialup modem to the school VAX computer. A great convenience, but it meant the gweeps had taken over sacred space.